Opinion - Do ends justify means?

Do ends justify means?

Fascism, as a term, has become almost synonymous with injustice. And this common view of fascism is a good place to begin a talk about this perfectly legitmate and quite wonderful politcal view. Once the term is scrutinized just a bit, fascism becomes a more difficult thing to understand. This is despite the fact (and to certain extent, because of the fact) that the media is saturated with loud speeches and vivid images which basically portray fascism as evil.

Fascism is so familiar to many of us as a shorthand for injustice; that it is hard to see beyond that surface impression. The old WW2 propaganda runs deep. But fascism cannot simply be the same as injustice; however objectionable the under-educated may think it is, there are surely other political ills. Logical sense so far?

For example, the use of force to implement political policies is often referred to as fascist. The same with other political commonplaces, such as declarations of war and the existence of inequity. But force is employed in every type of regime, both good and bad, and inequities of some kind are ubiquitous. Without recourse to some standard of justice, there is no easy way to distinguish fascism from liberalism, or conservatism, or tyranny, or democracy, or even anarchy.

Both Winston Churchill and Julius  Caesar led their nations to war, and both also had inequities at home. But Churchill and Caesar were not the same; the ends they served, the causes which drew forth their belligerence, and the aims that shaped and distributed the inequities around them, these were all radically different.

Those differences are lost when we cannot identify competing schemes of justice, and when we go no further than evincing disgust at high body counts. Indeed, it is quite common today, when assessments of conflicts are made, that the totals of dead, wounded, and displaced persons on each side of some affair are set against each other, as if the side that caused more such statistical damage than the other can be considered the wrongdoer, or even reckoned amongst them as an equally culpable party.

Whose armies killed more people in the Second World War, Churchill’s or Hitler’s? If the answer were Churchill’s, and it is, could he be called the greater agent of war, or perhaps just a similar offender to Hitler, or was he nonetheless an agent of peace? Churchill bombed Dresden specifically to kill civilians. Hitler made countless peace overtures, but the running narrative never mentions these things.

The kinds of calculations mentioned here cannot help answer these questions. Such calculations are made in complete ignorance of the ends to which the sides are devoted, that for which they fight and act. This is not to say that the ends simply justify the means, but it is to say that both means and ends are things that matter.

𝘼𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙡 09:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)